Winterstrike (38 page)

We got it,’ I said. Suddenly I needed to sit down, and collapsed into a seat, uncomfortably aware of the dead kappa’s body underneath. Rubirosa turned the orthocopter and I saw the
tower recede into the distance until its sharp tip was lost in the clouds. As a little warmth flooded into my hands, I hoped I’d never see it again, but it wasn’t the memory of the
climb that made me shiver. The nightmare of those writhing bodies in the cellar would stay with me for a long time. I looked down at the motionless body of the demothea and thought about tracking
devices. I wasn’t sure that the only trap had been the one we ourselves had set.

THIRTY

Alleghetta and I stood outside the door of Leretui’s chamber, peering through the crack. By now, my sister had completely broken down: a kind of writhing soup filled the
bed.

The majike had returned to her laboratory, saying that she needed some equipment. We were under strict instructions not to enter the chamber, and I, at least, had no intention of disobeying.
Alleghetta was a different matter. I’d already had to stop her charging into the room: to do what, I had no idea. Probably to tell Leretui to stop it at once.

‘Disgusting,’ Alleghetta hissed now, but I could tell she was fascinated.

‘That’s your child,’ I said, coldly. ‘Or was your child, at any rate.’

Alleghetta gave me a stare of equal iciness. ‘Leretui stopped being my child when she consorted with her fellows under that bridge.’
And when she nearly wrecked my chances with
the Matriarchy.
Alleghetta’s subtexts were not hard to interpret.

‘She didn’t consort,’ I protested, but more from habit than any real conviction. Leretui and the vulpen: who had led whom into disgrace?

‘Then tell me what’s happening now,’ Alleghetta pointed out. I was silent. My mother gave a death’s-head grin. ‘Gennera will take care of it.’

‘I don’t know if—’ I started to say, when downstairs, someone screamed. ‘That’s Thea!’ I’d expected any shrieks to be coming from the two of us. I
pulled Leretui’s door closed and raced down the hallway to the stairs.

I couldn’t tell quite where the scream had come from. We’d left Thea prostrate in the parlour, but I’d thought the sound had come from the other side of the house, from the
long dining room with the windows opening out onto the lawn, where my mothers had held so many of their social-climbing dinner parties. I headed for the dining room, therefore, with Alleghetta
panting at my heels.

Thea, ashen-faced, was backed against the far wall of the dining room, clutching the sideboard. At the other end of the room stood a familiar figure. Mantis was grinning. ‘Why, it’s
the sister. Nice to see you again, Essegui Harn. Sorry we couldn’t keep you for longer, but I suppose that doesn’t matter now.’

‘Essegui!’ Alleghetta barked. ‘Who is this?’

‘Her name is Mantis. She’s associated with the Noumenon.’

Mantis’s grin widened. ‘You’ll meet them soon.’

A plague of ghosts, from a city of spirits, allied with the Changed. It made a certain kind of sense.

The weapon that your cousin found in the library of Caud has been very useful,’ Mantis said. A weapon that can break down the barriers between the world of the dead and the world of the
living. Once that had been used, it left a crack for the Noumenon to seep through. So we owe everything to your family, really.’ She strode forward and the lights from the chandelier caught
on the barbs of the hooked weapon that she carried. Light flickered and flashed along the haunt-armour that she wore. Alleghetta took a step back.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know.

‘What do you think? Or “who”, I should really say.’

‘They’ve come for Leretui,’ I said.

‘No.’ That was Alleghetta. Thea gaped like a fish and I nearly said, ‘Take her.’

Alleghetta stepped forward, bristling. Seeing them together, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance between Mantis and my mother: they did not look physically alike, for Alleghetta was the
product of years of Winterstrike engineering and Mantis was what she was, but the psychic similarity was remarkable.

‘I don’t think you could stop me,’ Mantis said. ‘Where is she?’ she added to me. Her voice was caressing, almost hypnotic. ‘You want to get rid of her,
don’t you?’ she said. ‘I can see it in your face.’

‘Don’t,’ Thea’s voice trembled, and it was this rather than Alleghetta’s barked ‘Essegui!’ which made me, against my better judgement, say, ‘I
won’t tell you where she is.’ I stepped to stand in front of Mantis, between herself and Thea. But Mantis, instead of betraying annoyance, smiled.

‘Not to worry,’ she said gently. ‘Looks like you won’t have to.’

There was a sound behind me. The demothea that had once been my sister stood in the doorway. Leretui was still recognizable: something about the shape of the face, the angle of the eyes, and her
long black hair. The small mouth opened and a trilling sound emerged. Mantis was staring, as much as myself and my mothers, and I saw something cross her face that might even have been a distant
horror.

‘Hello, Shorn,’ she said.

The demothea’s mouth worked. I could see components inside that were not remotely human: Leretui’s transformation had been swift and effective. She extended a long hand to her
friend, the fingers more like tentacles, but it was a graceful gesture, a lady asking her beloved to join her on the ballroom floor. After a moment’s distinct hesitation, Mantis reached out
and took it.

‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, mockingly. ‘I’ll make sure she writes.’ Alleghetta made a convulsive move forward but they were gone, through the French windows and down
to the canal in the fading light.

We waited until the majike returned before investigating Leretui’s abandoned nest.

‘I think their genes must have been spliced with eels,’ Gennera said on our way upstairs. ‘Those things that live in the marshes of Earth, that stun their prey. The military
were keen naturalists, when all this began.’

‘She won’t change back now, will she?’ Thea quavered.

‘Doubt it.’

The smell was apparent as soon as we stepped onto the landing.

‘Like death,’ I said, retching. ‘It wasn’t this bad earlier.’

‘Let’s take a look,’ the majike said.

Leretui’s room was now filled with a clustering mass of dark threads, trailing from the ceiling and across the bed. It wasn’t clear where the smell was coming from until we looked
into the pit at the centre of the bed itself. Tangled in a mass of sheets was a decomposing form: something small and twisted.

‘It’s a child,’ I said. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’

‘A little older than a child, I think,’ the majike said. ‘It’s shrunk.’

When we looked at it more closely, we found that it was a young woman, and when the majike lifted her head to display short red hair, I recognized her as one of the more recent servants,
Jhule.

‘How long has she been here?’ I did a quick mental calculation. It wasn’t long enough for true decomposition to set in, as far as I understood the process; that meant that this
decay had somehow been accelerated. ‘Did she use the girl to
feed?.
Propel her transformation?’ I sat down in the least contaminated of the chairs, feeling sick.

‘I can only assume so. You can rest assured that this won’t get out. I’ll deal with it.’

‘I’m not concerned with Calmaretto’s reputation!’ Not entirely true, but it seemed to me that we’d gone far beyond any questions of social status.
‘Someone’s been killed!’

‘She’s gone,’ Gennera said, evincing some frustration. ‘It’s unlikely she’ll be coming back.’

It was useless to ask her where she thought Leretui might have vanished to: I had a better idea of that than the majike did.

‘We’ll get this cleaned and tested,’ Gennera added. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting to use this room for a while in any case.’

I shuddered. ‘If ever.’

Back in the parlour, I told my mothers what we’d discovered. Thea, predictably, went into hand-wringing panic. Alleghetta, also predictably, was dealing with fright by spitting nails.

‘That she can just walk in here and – who is this Mantis, anyway?’

‘I told you.’ More or less. I sank wearily into an armchair. It was by now quite dark outside, the short winter day coming to its close. The majike had departed for her laboratory. I
realized suddenly that the little centipede, the Queen’s informative pet, didn’t seem to be in my sleeves or anywhere on my person. Irrationally, I missed it. However strange she might
have been, I felt that the Queen had been able to provide answers, somehow. I hoped she still lived.

‘Essegui?’ That was Alleghetta. ‘I asked you a question.’

‘Sorry Wasn’t concentrating.’

‘I have as much on my mind as you, Essegui.’

I sighed. ‘What was it?’

‘When did Gennera say she’d be coming back?’

‘Later this evening. With a team.’

Alleghetta bristled once more.
‘More
people invading the house.’

‘I don’t think it can be helped, Mother.’

‘And what am I to tell the serving agency?’

‘That your daughter changed into a monster and ate one of their personnel?’

‘This is no time for levity!’

‘Mother, people will go missing.’ I hated not to assume responsibility for this, even if it was a relief of sorts to have the majike taking care of things. ‘We’ve been
invaded by an army of ghosts. You can blame it on that. Did you even know what the girl was called?’

‘I can’t be expected to remember
everything.’

I got up. ‘We’ll have to give the servants some sort of freedom, you realize that?’

‘I don’t see why,’ Alleghetta said. My mother had always taken a rather grand view of staff: the assumption that they should show a proper gratitude for the great favour of
being employed by us. Given how much they were paid and how they were treated, I’d never thought this was realistic.

‘Because we’re at war! We can’t protect them.’ We couldn’t even have protected ourselves, if Mantis had decided to attack. And the incursion showed how effective
the weir-wards were against certain persons. ‘They have to be free to make their own choices as to whether they stay or not.’

Alleghetta’s face showed what she thought of this idea.

‘Look, I’ll talk to you later,’ I told her. It felt more like midnight than teatime. I went down to the kitchen, avoiding the servants’ eyes. There was a palpable tension
in the air: hardly surprising. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

‘If the mansion’s attacked,’ I said, ‘you’re to do what you think best as regards your own survival. No one will be prosecuted later for desertion if you decide not
to stay.’

‘I won’t leave Mistress Thea.’ That was the cook, who’d been there for years.

‘It’s up to you, Shia,’ I said. I could tell from the expressions of the younger servants that they’d be bailing out at the first opportunity if it came to it.

‘Mistress Essegui?’ someone said. ‘I think Jhule’s already gone. She wasn’t in our chamber this morning and I haven’t seen her for a couple of
days.’

‘She’s probably fled,’ I said, ashamed. I knew exactly where Jhule was. I wished the majike would come back, sweep all traces of Leretui from our home, leave us in peace. But
peace obviously isn’t an option in war.

I was coming back up the stairs when a group of people swept into the hall: Gennera, returning.

Alleghetta and I once more hovered as the majike and her little team of whispering excissieres stripped Leretui’s chamber. Jhule’s body was the first to be removed, and that lessened
the stink, to some degree. I’d expected them to do tests, as Gennera had said, and they did, but they also removed all the furniture, including the wall hangings and the rugs. Leretui’s
childhood books were taken from the bookcase and piled into sterile crates. I watched them go numbly; she wouldn’t be needing them now. It all took less time than I’d supposed, to get
rid of a life. The majike gave me a penetrating look as she came through the door.

‘Now you can start to grieve,’ she said, with a sensitivity that I wouldn’t have expected of her, or would not in any case have expected her to express. But I thought that
I’d started grieving a year before, when the Malcontent had come home from Ombre.

‘Thank you for everything you’ve done,’ Alleghetta said, gushing. I tried not to wince.

‘If we need further assistance, I’ll call you, of course,’ the majike said, with the faintest trace of warmth. Her gloved fingers pressed mine like claws. ‘There’s
nothing more for you to worry about.’

Except invasion and war and my sister, changed. I saw her out of the house and sought my bed.

THIRTY-ONE

I woke from an unsettled sleep to find that we were landing. Stiff, but warmer, I climbed down out of the hatch and saw that we’d come down onto a huge platform. The sun
was sinking in a lemony sky and the heave of waves was clearly visible. After the chill of the ruined city and the saltmarshes, the humid heat struck me like a big warm fist.

‘Where are we?’

‘The edge of Ropa,’ the kappa informed me. She pointed to what might have been a distant line of land. ‘Pan-Asia beyond.’

‘And this?’

‘A refuelling station. For ships as well as aircraft. Owned by the Tukriya.’ She pointed to where several figures were scurrying around a tank. ‘I’ve arranged
payment.’

‘Will it be enough to get us to Malay?’

‘No. We’ll need more fuel later. In the shamandoms.’

That sounded more exciting than the platform. I walked to the edge of it with Rubirosa while the orthocopter was refuelled, but could see nothing except the slow churn of the waves. Small boats
clustered around the base of the platform, riding out the night.

‘A dreary planet, so far,’ Rubirosa said. ‘And wet.’

I was obliged to agree. We returned to the orthocopter, not wanting to leave the demothea alone for too long, although Rubirosa had told me that the kappa had stunned it again.

‘Can’t take the risk of it regaining consciousness.’